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A Roar Begins, Sacred Burn, The Body Knows, Beyond Measure, What Remains.
The Ardor issue / April 11, 2026
Welcome to The Ardor Issue, where some things do not fade but continue to burn. This issue opens with An Unmistakable Roar, a poem set at Augusta National during Masters week, where legions arrive in passionate pilgrimage, drawn by something they cannot fully name and cannot stay away from. Augusta marks a man, humbles him, and refuses to release him, but it also calls him back. That is ardor operating in plain sight. The course burns. The tournament burns. Every April, someone stands on that ground and burns for more.
This issue follows that enthusiasm across time and form. Christopher Smart, confined and called mad by his time, wrote praise so consuming that it could not be contained, and his work stands as ardor without romance or restraint. Sappho gave us the body breaking under desire, capturing the moment when speech fails and feeling takes over entirely, where language begins to stretch past accuracy, what we later call hyperbole, to carry what the body already knows. Further in, Richard Flanagan gave us Dorrigo Evans, a man who carried love through the Burma Death Railway without softening, as it instead sharpened under suffering. These voices move through different forms, centuries, and objects of devotion, yet they hold to the same fire.
May something in these pages burn you in the right way. Until next time.
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
Echoes
Testaments
Devices
Creative Spotlight
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Featured Poem
An Unmistakable Roar
An Unmistakable Roar
by Jason Z Guest
Legions of luxury aircraft land by permission
of the tower, both golfer and fan
arriving in beautiful timing like the iced-Azalea bloom.
This Georgia wildflower absorbs the whispering swoon
riding on roars of emerging leaders and approaching doom.
Fairways of rye carry whispers and bent grass greens devour
while ice swims around rims of an Augusta Sour,
this clubhouse, the crowned centerpiece within Bobby Jones’ bower.
Woe the weary of unerasable losses on its hallowed ground;
near-perfect imperfections abound, where the dawn
of a new era illuminates the last ticks of life’s fragility,
a game that humbles players of their greatest ability.
Astounding, the ways this tournament plays to the wire,
for here, man’s greatness knows not age nor the hour.
Such power.
Like that of National’s last survivor,
and its occasional release of a tiger.
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Echoes
Christopher Smart
On this day in 1722, Christopher Smart was born. There are poets who write about devotion, and then there are those who are consumed by it. Smart belongs to the latter. Confined to a private madhouse for what his time called religious mania, he wrote Jubilate Agno as overflow, spilling out because something inside had built up too much to hold in. The poem reads today as strange, however, in those days it was seen as too much fire and passion. |
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The poem lived in isolation, unpublished in his lifetime. Left behind in fragments, it was rediscovered in 1939 like something that refused to die. This is ardor in its purest form. Neither romance nor restraint, it sat as a sustained act of praise that did not ask permission.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For he knows that God is his Saviour. — Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, (c. 1759–1763), first published 1939
Step into the full work and see how far praise of Jubilate Agno can go:
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Testaments
Sappho
Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 BCE. Almost nothing of her work survives intact. What remains comes in fragments, preserved in quotations or recovered from scraps of papyrus. It is enough to know she was one of antiquity's most precise poets of desire because she wrote not around feeling but into it, locating the exact moment the body mutinies against the will. What she captured was not romance in any decorative sense. It was that condition underneath romance. You know, the older and less negotiable one. |
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She wrote about longing as a force that overtakes the body before the mind can steady it. I think of this as ardor in its raw form. In what is referred to as Fragment 31, Sappho watches the person she loves speak with another and records the physical collapse that follows.
He seems to me equal to gods, that man who sits opposite you and listens to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. This sets my heart to flutter in my chest, for when I look at you a moment, then I have no more speech.” — Sappho, Fragment 31, c. 600 BCE, translated by Anne Carson
This is ardor, the breaking of the body under the weight of passion and feeling. Pick up a copy of Carson’s If Not, Winter and sit with what survives.
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Devices
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is exaggeration that tells the truth. It is what happens when feeling gets too large for accurate description and the language has to stretch to keep up. Sappho gives us the purest form. Three words: "You burn me." No one is on fire, but the body says otherwise. Heat, loss of control, the feeling that someone else is living under your skin. The line works because it is exactly right as a feeling, even if it is impossible as a fact. |
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Christopher Smart takes it further. In Jubilate Agno, his praise of God builds and builds and refuses to stop. It repeats, accumulates, keeps finding new air. He is not describing devotion. He is inside it, and the poem cannot contain him. That is what heat does to language. It does not settle for what is accurate. It reaches for what is true. Sometimes those are the same thing. When they are, you get Sappho. When they are not, you still get something worth reading.
Desire has always known how to exaggerate. Here are some of the greatest hyperboles in pop music for your enjoyment.
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Creative Spotlight
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North follows Dorrigo Evans, an Australian POW forced onto the Burma Death Railway, carrying a love that never loosens its grip. The title traces back to Matsuo Bashō, who walked into the wild not to escape life, but in the pursuit of beauty to feel it more deeply. This is not a story about love saving a man. It is about ardor marking him. Dorrigo’s love for Amy is absolute, and it does not fade under suffering. It sharpens. |
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Sappho is never named, but she is there all the same. Her Fragment 38, just three words in the original Greek, is often rendered: “You burn me.” That line sits beneath the novel like a current. In one of its most telling moments, Dorrigo meets Amy in a bookshop. She finds him reading Catullus and answers with her own offering, a poem stripped to its core: “You burn me.”
That is the whole argument. Amy burns him. The fire outlives the camps, the years, and the life he tries to build around it. What he endures is not separate from that love. It is formed by it.
Some desires do not resolve. They remain, and in remaining, become the road itself.
Prime Video's 2025 adaptation of the novel carries the same title. Be sure to check it out below.
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